Prior to his career in government service, Cannon (who died at 93 in 2011) spent years as a journalist, and that training...
An advisor to President Gerald Ford (1913–2006) pens an admiring biography of America’s most anomalous and, possibly, most underrated chief executive.
In 1974, America was led by a president and vice president for whom no one had voted. The first in our history appointed to the vice presidency by means of the 25th Amendment, Ford became president when Richard Nixon resigned, as Vice President Spiro Agnew had before him, in disgrace. Throughout the course of his administration, Ford faced a country torn by the Watergate scandal, exhausted by the war in Vietnam and mired in an economic depression. Still, even with Congress in the hands of the Democrats, Ford managed to reassure the nation and restore some measure of trust in government. Cannon (Apostle Paul: A Novel, 2005, etc.) moves swiftly over Ford’s early life, education and legal practice, even his distinguished 25-year congressional career. Nor, except for a brief treatment of Ford’s 1980 flirtation with joining the Reagan ticket, is there much about the Michigander’s 29-year post-presidency. Cannon focuses on the Constitutional crisis that brought Ford to high office, the man’s exceptional character, how he dealt with the major issues and how he managed the presidency, particularly the members of his Cabinet. Although Cannon has Ford confessing to a few political sins—a misguided crusade during his congressional years against Supreme Court Justice William Douglas, the cowardly dumping of Vice President Nelson Rockefeller from the ’76 ticket—and faults him for failing to win election in his own right, this insider account persuasively demonstrates that the man was a far better president than campaigner and that, at a particularly low moment in our history, we were perhaps luckier than we knew to have him.
Prior to his career in government service, Cannon (who died at 93 in 2011) spent years as a journalist, and that training shows in this smoothly readable account.Pub Date: June 28, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-472-11604-1
Page Count: 500
Publisher: Univ. of Michigan
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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